I am a traditional PC gamer, and proud of what that means. We were the first, the crazy ones who looked at a few pixels on a tube TV and saw space battles. We built the keep brick by brick, out of mailing lists, BBS posts, and LAN parties in someone's basement.
We were the nerds, and there were never enough of us to bother discriminating on small things like gender or race. A rocket to the face is the universal language of love and understanding.
We looked after our own, and when the suits tried to turn us into products, we made them eat their products. Ask Unity about their runtime fees. Ask Electronic Arts about the loot box economy.
The fortress worked. And like in all fortresses, you could not see what was happening on the other side of the wall.
We scoffed at mobile gaming. Let the casuals have their candy crushers, we said, and turned back to our superior games. Today, mobile gaming makes roughly twice what PC gaming makes, and almost all of it is roulettes, energy timers, and live service wallet-squeezing dressed up as games.
Our instincts were right. Free-to-play monetisation is a cancer. We were also wrong, because the people on mobile were never the enemy. They were our cousins, and we let them fend for themselves in their infancy, against the wolves. Now they live in a wasteland with no permanence and no discovery, the perfect breeding ground for cynical companies. We called it. We did not stop it. We just locked the gate.
Twenty years and a few “this changes everything” hype cycles in, I can tell you what is about to happen with AI.
We are about to do it again. The current discourse from the gaming community on AI is a tantrum. Awards refused. Studios pilloried. Devs mocked for admitting they used a model to clean up textures. Steam pages now carry a NO AI badge like a garlic wreath against vampires. The mood inside the keep is loud, righteous, and absolutely certain.
The mood is also half right, which is the worst kind of right. AI training is being done unscrupulously, without attribution, with no regard for the work it consumes. Meta spends billions on compute and then has its engineers scour the internet for free books like teenagers without lunch money. They all do, from OpenAI to Anthropic. That is real, it is wrong, and it is worth fighting.
But the fight inside our fortress right now is not that fight. The entire community is raging against the letters A and I. It is symbolic, total, and unwinnable, and it is being waged with exactly the same energy we once spent ignoring mobile gaming.
AI is not going back in the box. It is becoming the control layer for the next decade of software production, including game production, including yours. The studios that learn to direct it will outproduce the ones that refuse to touch it. That is not propaganda. That is what already happened with engines, with middleware, with version control, with every other tool the previous generation of nerds also swore they would never use.
The actual battle worth fighting has clear edges. Training data attribution. Compensation for ingested work. Provenance on outputs. Labour protections for the artists whose pipelines change. Those are concrete fights with concrete wins available, and they are exactly the fights the cultural reaction is drowning out.
We can refuse to engage with the technology and lose the leverage to shape it. We can engage, become the control layer, and use that position to insist on the parts of this that matter. There is no third door. There never is.
The fortress was a good idea. It still is, for what it is good for. But the wolves do not care about the wall. They never have. They go around. And one day you look out and realise the people you were supposed to protect are no longer in the field.
So calm down. Read a contract. Pick the fight you can actually win. And maybe, just this once, open the gate before the war is already over.